Mitsubishi HC7900DW Home Theater Projector Review

November 27, 2012 - Art Feierman

This is what separates the good from the average. It’s all about the picture. The HC7900DW just so happens to be one of the “good” ones. It is a projector that has especially good image quality, most notably in terms of the naturalness of skin tones.. Let’s investigate:

Mitsubishi HC7900DW Out of the Box Picture Quality

Pretty good right out of the box, skin tones look pretty good, but calibrating it makes the skin tones really exceptional. Overall, I’d say Cinema mode provides color accuracy better than you’ll see on most LCDTVs. Every mode looks good as long as you avoid using the High Brightness Color Temp. (Medium is good!) High Brightness mode is demonstrated/criticized, in the Performance section.

Game mode is definitely the best bet, when you want a brighter picture than “best mode”.

Before I go on, the usual warning about the photos in this review:

A lot goes on in delivering these images to your eyeballs: There’s the projected image, and any shifts due to the camera, (a Canon 60D professional dSLR), a Mac laptop for cropping and resizing, etc, using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, then saved “for web” (super compressed), and displayed with your graphics card, monitor, and browser all, further coloring the HC7900 photos. In other words, they are useful, only to a point, as colors are not going to be all that accurate. Rest assured, the Mitsubishi HC7900DW will look better in your darkened theater, than these images on your computer monitor.

The projector is pleasing enough in most settings, and for most content, but again, calibrating this projector makes a difference. Don’t believe me? If you purchase a HC7900DW, try our settings.

Click Image to Enlarge

Mitsubishi HC7900DW Projector - Flesh Tones

Hard to beat the Mitsubishi HC7900DW in terms of reproducing skin tones post calibration. I mean it looks really good. We start with our usual images of Arwen and Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. Arwen’s face picks up the greenish caste from the woods she’s riding through, and Gandalf – well, it’s hard to fault the skin tones you see there. He just looked great.

Note, the sports and HDTV images, like the one below, have Brilliant Color on, when photographed. That provided more brightness, but a slightly cooler – less red, image.